Cheap No More

RALEIGH – North Carolina’s community colleges – the “emergency room of higher education” – are getting increasingly expensive, buffeted by a double whammy of staggering increases in student demand and cuts in per-student funding.

Consider the following:

• Since the 2008-09 school year, the cost of tuition per credit hour at community colleges has risen by 58 percent;

• Since the 2007-08 school year, student enrollment has increased by 6 percent while state funding has increased by just 2.2 percent;

• That rise in student population, coupled with the cuts in funding, has resulted in a 14 percent reduction in per-student funding since 2007-08.

North Carolina’s community colleges – there are 58 of them – were established as a lower-cost, two-year alternative to the more expensive, four-year institutions in the University of North Carolina System. Yet the gap between the cost to attend a community college and a UNC System school is closing.

Tuition for a full 16-credit course load at a community college is $2,128 per year. That’s approaching the $2,776 in tuition at UNC’s lowest-cost school, Elizabeth City State University. In addition, fees at UNC schools range from about $1,600 to $2,500. Community colleges do not charge such fees.

“We are the emergency room of higher education,” says Scott Ralls, president of the N.C. Community College System. “We’ve got more and more students that are turning to community colleges because they are getting priced out of other forms of higher education. ... It’s certainly tighter now than it’s ever been.”

With increased enrollments, colleges need to expand programs, particularly in fields with strong job prospects like nursing, engineering or machining. But instead of expanding all necessary programs, colleges must choose one program over another.

“Sometimes I think we are more important in the educational fabric than people realize,” Ralls says.

The effects of the Great Recession and resulting unemployment sent thousands of people looking for ways to retool themselves for another profession or trade. Many turned to the community colleges. Today, more than half of all North Carolinians who are enrolled in higher education – including public and private four-year universities – attend a community college.

While Ralls doesn’t want funding reduced for the UNC System or for public schools, he says the community colleges are straining to meet higher demand with fewer resources.

“We try to be realists,” he says. “We have to figure out how to do more with less.”

Case study: Conor McCarthy

Community colleges fill an important role in North Carolina. Just ask Conor McCarthy. After graduating from Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh, McCarthy worked mostly minimum wage jobs where “people pretty much spit on you when they see you,” he says.

That helped motivate him to seek a career in plumbing, like his father. Unfortunately, he found companies wanted him to have experience, putting him in a catch-22 in which one needs a job for experience, but experience for a job.

He decided to enroll in a one-year plumber’s certification program at Wake Technical Community College. He graduated in December, and the 25-year-old now works as a plumber for Waco, based in Garner. It’s not the best job, he admits, “but it’s better than the alternative.” Plus he now has a foundation to build on and can work toward becoming a licensed plumber and even going into business for himself one day.

The community college system does not currently have a way to track employment after graduation, but Megen Hoenk, the system’s director of marketing and external affairs, says she knows many students work while they take courses, though that could be attributed to the nature of the student body.

Gov. Pat McCrory has been vocal about gearing higher education more for the work force. He hasn’t singled out community colleges specifically, but he has met with various college leaders in the past months.

“Of course, I’m biased, but I think we are the most job-oriented form of education there is,” Ralls says.

McCrory was not made available to comment for this article.

Missions are different

The UNC System receives about twice the amount from taxpayers that community colleges do, but university advocates point out that the two schooling entities have very different missions. In addition to teaching, professors at research universities like UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University perform their own scholarship, including research.

Plus, many professors help pay their way. In the 2010-11 school year alone, scientists in the UNC System combined to bring in nearly $1.4 billion of sponsored research, which university officials say generates economic activity outside of the universities. The Triangle’s two research universities alone accounted for more than $1 billion of sponsored research.

Woodson also points out that the “highest demand in the work force is for graduates with four-year degrees.”

Instead of contrasting the UNC System with the community colleges, Woodson advocates for a system that better integrates the two. Historically, community colleges were about technical training and skills, but they now have a split goal of also sending students to four-year colleges.

Woodson says NCSU takes between 1,000 and 1,200 transfers from community colleges every year and sees that as an “affordable and convenient pathway for students to achieve their full potential.”

That’s a pathway that seems to be the road less traveled. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 81 percent of students entering community college intend to go on to earn at least a bachelor’s degree – but fewer than 12 percent actually achieve that goal.

UNC and the colleges have a transfer system in place, but it could work better. After reviewing the program a few years ago, Ralls says they realized “it’s not nearly as good as we thought it was, and we are taking steps to improve it.”

Higher education food chain

Matthew Lambert, vice president for university development at The College of William & Mary and author of a forthcoming book about the effects of privatization in higher education, explains the relationship between universities and colleges like this, paraphrased from an email: Institutions at the lowest end of the food chain are populated with the poorest and most at-risk students, many of whom are minorities. These institutions receive less per student than four-year universities because they don’t engage in research, which is costly, and mainly focus on lower-level teaching, which is cheaper.

“I wouldn’t say it’s right or wrong, but it is complex,” Lambert says.

States end up spending more per student for the wealthier, better educated, and, generally, white students, but those graduates tend to provide a higher return to the state economy, so it becomes easier to justify that higher investment.

A recent report from the Century Foundation calls for an overhaul of America’s system of higher education. The group points out that in 1996, the U.S. ranked second behind only Korea in the number of young people who received an associate’s degree or higher. By 2013, the U.S. had slipped to 14th in the world.

The Obama administration has set the goal for the United States to climb those rankings to the top spot by 2020, which would require 8 million new degrees. Ideally, President Barack Obama has said he wants 5 million of those degrees to come from community colleges.

After reviewing the Century Foundation’s findings, Ralls says, “I think there are a lot of pieces that certainly resonate with us.” However, he emphasizes that he does not want to take funding away from other avenues of education.

The Century Foundation finds that a “central problem is that community colleges are asked to educate those students with the greatest needs using the least funds, in increasingly, separate and unequal institutions. Separate in terms of their socioeconomic and racial stratification (and) unequal in terms of their respective funding and academic outcomes.”

Research by Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, directors of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, shows that from 1982 to 2006, the proportion of community college students from the bottom socioeconomic quartile increased by 7 percentage points, to more than a quarter of all students. In contrast, the proportion of students in the highest socioeconomic quartile decreased by 8 percentage points, to 16 percent of the overall student population.

Nationally, funding for universities and colleges has become more disparate. In the decade from 1999 to 2009, budgets at public research universities across the nation increased by nearly $4,000 per student, while community college budgets increased by $1 per student. (That’s not a typeo; they increased by $1).

As for solutions, the foundation recommends: “Tie higher education funding to institutions serving students with the greatest needs. Funding for higher education should more closely mimic that of K-12 education, channeling extra funds to economically disadvantaged students who, on average, have greater educational needs.”

The group also suggests that community colleges should have broader authority to grant bachelor’s degrees.